Do you believe the result about priming people with a $1500 bill and a $150 bill? That pattern matches perfectly to an infinite list of priming research that failed to replicate, so by default I would assume it is probably wrong.

The one about people scoring better after harvest makes a lot more sense since, like, it's a real difference and not some priming thing, so I am not as skeptical about that.

It kind of weirds me out that this post has such a high karma score. It's a fun read, and maybe it will help some Wikipedia admins get their house in order, but I don't like "we good guys are being wronged by the bad outsider" content on LessWrong. No offense to Trace who is a great writer and clearly worked hard putting all this together.

It seems like this is a place where "controversial" and "taboo" diverge in meaning. The politician would notice that the sentence was about a taboo topic and bounce off, but that's probably totally unconnected to whether or not it would be controversial among people who know anything about genetics or intelligence and are actually expressing a belief. For example, they would bounce off regardless of whether the number in the sentence was 1%, 50%, or 90%.

I thought the sequels were far better than the first book. But I have seen people with the opposite opinion.

How did you like your trip in the end?

It definitely depends. I think there are lots of people for which there are lots of domains of information for which they are highly trustworthy in realtime conversation. For example, if I am working as a programmer, and I talk to my smart, productive coworker and ask him some normal questions about the system he built recently, I expect him to be highly confident and well calibrated on what he knows. Or if I talk to my friend with a physics PhD and ask him some question like what makes there be friction, I expect him to be highly confident and well calibrated. Certainly he isn't likely to say something confident and then I look on Wikipedia and he was totally wrong.

In general I take more seriously what people say if

• They are a person who has a source of information that could be good about the thing they are saying.
• They are a person who is capable of saying they don't know instead of bullshitting me, when they don't know. And in general they respect the value of expressing uncertainty.
• The thing they are saying could be something that is easier to actually know and understand and remember, instead of super hard. For example, maybe it is part of a kind of consistent gears-level model of some domain, so if they forgot or got it mixed up, they may notice their error.

I hope you don't feel dumb! What could be smarter than sitting around thinking up good ideas, writing about them, and getting a bunch of people to work together to figure out what to make of them? It seems like the most smart possible behavior!

It seems like the students think that eliminating the distractions wouldn't improve how much they learn in class. That sounds ridiculous to me, but public school classrooms are a weird environment that already aren't really set up well to teach anyone anything, so maybe it could be true. Is it credible?

As a non-physicist I kind of had the idea that the reason I was taught Newtonian mechanics in high school was that it was assumed I wasn't going to have the time, motivation, or brainpower to learn some kind of fancy, real university version of it, so the alternate idea that it's useful for intuition-building of the concepts is novel and interesting to me.

Learning piano I have been pretty skeptical about the importance of learning to read sheet music fluently. All piano players culturally seem to insist that it's very important, but my sense is that it's some kind of weird bias. If you tell piano players that you should hear it in your head and play it expressively, they will start saying stuff about, what if you don't already know what it's supposed to sound like, how will you figure it out, and they don't like "I will go listen to it" as an answer.

So far, I am not very fluent at reading, so maybe I just don't get it yet.